This is Andrey Kondrashov’s documentary on the return of Crimea to Russia, aired in Russia on March 15, and now available with English subtitles. It has been a year since Crimeans took to the polls to vote for returning to their Motherland and leaving wretched Ukraine behind. The Western powers – led, as ever, by the US and UK – are determined to portray this momentous historic event as an imperial land-grab by Russia, and that it caused the subsequent civil war between Kiev and the breakaway provinces in the country’s East.

However, as this excellent documentary shows, the Russian government could see that the violent manner in which the elected Ukrainian leader Yanukovich had been ousted from power – with American fingerprints all over it – meant chaos would soon spread throughout Ukraine, and that the majority ethnic Russian population in Crimea would be among the worst hit by neo-Nazi militias terrorizing anyone whom they considered ‘insufficiently loyal’ to the US-selected regime. When President Yanukovich fled the capital on February 22nd 2014, President Putin set in motion a series of responses that would present the first real (and successful) challenge to American imperial hegemony.